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Are your user personas a little dated and a little iStocky? Are your sales funnels just not cutting it anymore? Then it's time for Iron Unicorn 2… Read More

Are your user personas a little dated and a little iStocky? Are your sales funnels just not cutting it anymore? Then it's time for Iron Unicorn 2: Unicorn Feud, a workshop that looks at customer journey maps—the intersection of user data, behavioral stages, touch-points, decision-making, cross-team resourcing, and sentiment that takes the guesswork out of customer motivation. Read Less

The Unicorn Feud evolution of our highly-successful Iron Unicorn workshop/gameshow turns the journey map and user research process on it's head both by combining a little bit of Family Feud, a little bit of Clue, and a lot of fun to practice techniques for uncovering the interactions that help your customers succeed and the best efforts that help you encourage them. In doing, the creation and utility of journey maps are revealed—the intersection of user data, behavioral stages, touch-points, decision-making, and sentiment that takes the guesswork out of customer motivation.

Workshop attendees—nearly all of then Apple-users who work in digital marketing and experience design—were tasked with a challenge quite outside their comfort zone: Using real user research and a real product customer journey map to find the most creative and inventive way to engage a target persona and convert them into a Microsoft Hololens user. The catch? The sale had to happen in-store. Real user data, collected by a MaxMedia research team who surveyed dozens of customers outside the Lenox Square Microsoft Store, was revealed gradually and with many surprising insights through a Family Feud-style interface.

The teams' solutions were original—the winning team proposing an exciting event for early-adopters (including Professor Plum) and the developer community at SXSW that showcased the Hololens, engaged the target market, then drove them to their local Microsoft retail store for pickup and further interaction.

We followed up with Narwhal Tank, a creative stab at Shark Tank. Because whatever you do—design, code, manage, or lead—at some point we all have to pitch. It might be new business, it might be a new idea, it might even be ourselves. But getting someone else to buy into our ideas isn't as simple as showing them how great—or even how affordable—it might be. There's a science and a technique to it.

We used this prompt as an opprtunity to practice using neuroscience and storytelling to pitch effectively and quickly. Bring their own ideas or creating one with us, attendees practiced building and presenting their perfect pitch to a panel of judges, drawing lessons from Oren Klaff's Pitch Anything to frame our their story and maintain suspense.

Iron Unicorn returns to MaxMedia in the form of Unicorn Feud!

The basic value of journey maps and personas: That good user research can yield detailed map of various user touchpoints that, when combined with equally well-researched needs-based personas, reveals opportunities for improved engagement, new experiences, and (best of all!) disruption of established habits and status quo.

Markham Butler's amazing three-way Unicorn Feud interactive game, complete with the world's most upbeat game show music and rewarding buzzers.

Walking workshop attendees through our three-way Microsoft Hololens journey map, looking at both digital and real-world touchpoints as well as their agnostic overlaps.

The third instalment in our Iron Unicorn series: Narwhal Tank

The science of persuasion, delivering your message in the evolutionary order, starting with the emotional reptile brain and advancing through the social midbrain to the rational neocortex. By targeting a pitch toward these brain centers, we both mimic the ideation process and avoid triggering fight-or-flight responses by hitting the rational brain first.

Storytelling mechanics trigger our brain chemistry, inciting desire, tension, and their aggregate—attention. Like that time our plane almost collided with...

Oren Klaff's elevator pitch formula focuses on emotion and incentive rather than cost or logistics becuase buy-in—like most decisions—is an emotion first, reason second proposition.

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Basic Info

Are your user personas a little dated and a little iStocky? Are your sales funnels just not cutting it anymore? Then it's time for Iron Unicorn 2: Unicorn Feud, a workshop that looks at customer journey maps—the intersection of user data, behavioral stages, touch-points, decision-making, cross-team resourcing, and sentiment that takes the guesswork out of customer motivation.